The scandal erupted with the publication of a report by Citizen Lab, a Canadian body based at the University of Toronto, which claimed that the government of Between 2017 and 2020, Spain used an Israeli software called Pegasus to spy on more than 60 Catalan independence leaders.
Pegasus allows, once installed on a cell phone, access to messages, data, and activate the device remotely to record images or sound.
“We are talking about a serious issue that requires serious answers,” he insisted, recalling that his government announced last Sunday the opening of an internal investigation in the CNational Intelligence Center (CNI), another by the Ombudsman, and parliamentary control of the intelligence services.
At the same time, Sánchez insisted that the CNI acted “scrupulously in compliance with the law,” the AFP news agency reported.
Since the case broke out, the Spanish government has never acknowledged that the espionage took place.
However, citing sources close to the CNI, the newspaper El País stated yesterday that the intelligence services did spy on the Catalan separatists but with judicial permission, and selectivelynot massive, as reported.
Pedro Sánchez’s Executive is an alliance between his center-left socialist PSOE party and leftist Podemos, which depends on the support it has in Parliament from the Catalan leftist independence party ERC.
In another gesture aimed at appeasing the independence supporters, the socialist president of the Congress of Deputies yesterday authorized a modification of the election of the future members of the parliamentary commission of “official secrets”, where the performance of the CNI in this case will be analyzed, and that will allow the inclusion of ERC in it.
“Of course the State has spied, is spying and will spy in an ‘illegal’ way; I am sure that he does so because his Interior positions for the last 40 years in three Interior commissions have told me [del Congreso]”, ERC spokesman Gabriel Rufián told Sánchez.
“The question is whether this time you ordered the espionage, because if you ordered it, it is terribly serious. and, if not, it is terribly more serious, because they have not cleaned the sewers, that if it is not cleaned they fill with rats and eat everything, “he concluded.
Considering that his government depends in particular on the parliamentary support of the separatist ERC party, Pedro Sánchez asked him to rebuild “trust”, and asked him not to withdraw his support.
The ERC is a key ally for the validation of the anti-crisis decree, a package of measures to mitigate the effects of the war in Ukraine.
The approval of the text hangs in the balance due to the outrage among the government’s parliamentary partners over the Pegasus case.
Given the tensions between the PSOE and its partners, the Sánchez government formally requested the support of the right-wing Popular Party (PP), the main opposition force.
Source: Ambito
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